1/12Weighing 2,400 pounds with the average driver in it and 440 hp available under toe, Sidewinder is a sideways thrill ride.

It's done. We drove it, we beat on it, and it stayed together. We're talking about the Factory Five Roadster we built last month (and the engine the month before that), and the little car is a brutal handful in the best possible way. First a little back story.

2/12The engine is a 427, but it's not an FE. This is one of Coast High Performance's Cobra Classic crate engines that puts a stroker crank in a 351 Windsor block. A reasonable hydraulic-roller cam, AFR heads, an Edelbrock intake, and a Demon carb make around 500 hp at the crank.

Over a year ago, HOT ROD got together with Factory Five Racing to build one of its Roadster kits. They don't call them Cobras, since that can create legal tension between Ford, Carroll Shelby, and any of the other principals that claim to have ownership of the word Cobra. So the FFR car is called the Roadster, even if everybody out of litigation's reach calls it a Cobra. The FFR Roadster is unique in that it uses a bunch of parts from a '79-later Mustang, including the running gear, suspension, wiring, fuel tank, and other stuff. The base kit is reasonably priced, a donor Mustang to strip of parts is dirt cheap, and the kits go together about as easily as you could expect of a car meant to be built by the average hot rodder in the average home garage.

3/12This car has FFR's optional three-link rear suspension developed for its spec racer program. The rearend is a bolt-in 9-inch from Moser, and 13-inch Baer discs stop it.

Since this is HOT ROD, we didn't want to build a standard-issue car, so we hired designer Murray Pfaff to give us a few ideas on an FFR befitting the HOT ROD name. After a few different tries, the Sidewinder was born. Muscle Car Restorations (MCR) in Wisconsin was enlisted to actually build the car, and instead of using greasy junkyard parts, we tried to use as many new parts as possible. That included a Moser bolt-in 9-inch rearend, a new Tremec TKO II five-speed, and a Coast High Performance-built Cobra Classic 427ci Windsor Ford. Various other parts came as options in the FFR kit and from other sources, as outlined in last month's build story. This month, we finally got to sit in it, turn the key, and stomp its guts out. Man, was it fun!

4/12The 18x9 wheels are from FFR. They're based off Ford Racing's FR500 Mustang wheels. We ran Kumho road race tires at the track, but the car now has a set of Toyo T1Rs on it.

Having never driven a Cobra kit car, we were shocked at how tight the FFR car is. We went in expecting the equivalent of a homebuilt, which means a rattletrap that's painful to drive and twitchy at speed. But the FFR car doesn't rattle, it doesn't shake, it's as smooth as a Fox-body Mustang, and it's fast. Very fast, thanks to a curb weight of about 2,200 pounds (without our bulky butt in the seat) and 440 hp at the rear tires. Because FFR did the finishing details on the car right up to the point where we showed up to test it, there was no time to get it registered, so our driving experiences were limited to the track and its surrounding roads. But an entire day spent driving several radically different versions of FFR cars, from factory demos to pure homebuilts, solidified the opinion that these are real cars, not toys.

5/12The front suspension is also off the option list. Upper and lower arms are fully adjustable, the coilovers are from Bilstein, and the brakes are big Baers.

But don't be mistaken; it's not like driving a Crown Vic. It is still a Cobra at heart, and that means hot and cramped footwells (guys with big feet will need some custom work done there), the potential of seared calves from the side pipes (though you'll only do that once--trust us), and because the optional soft top defeats the entire purpose of the car and looks completely wrong, the wind is always in your hair, eyes, and ears. If your significant other repeatedly asks to put the top up on your convertible Mustang, don't expect him or her to even come near the Cobra--you might want to look at the Daytona Coupe in that case. Only the most hard-core folks would consider using one for a daily driver, but from a reliability standpoint, it works for that just fine.

6/12Auto Meter makes these gauges to mimic the horribly inaccurate Smiths gauges used in the original Cobras.

Quarter-mile e.t. is the real measure of a car in our opinion, so that was the first order of business with the Sidewinder. The FFR crew delivered the Sidewinder and about 10 of its own and customer's cars to New England Dragway in Epping, New Hampshire, for a day of track fun. After driving the Sidewinder around the pits to familiarize ourselves with it, we headed to the burnout box. The first pass revealed a problem that would plague us all day, but we didn't figure out what was really wrong until later. A misadjusted clutch made it nearly impossible to hit Third or Fourth gear at anything over 4,000 rpm, and it got worse as the day wore on. With a good half-second lost trying to force it into gear, the best we could muster was a 12.01 at a healthy 123.22 mph. It had the fastest trap speed of all but one Cobra there that day, but four other cars were in the 11s, including Brian Dinsmore's 289 car that ran 11.60 at 117 on slicks. Shockingly, our car cut consistent 1.6-second 60-foot times with a best of 1.63 without slicks; we ran Kumho road racing tires aired down to 18 psi.

7/12We were shocked at how well the FFR car leaves on street tires. A best 60-foot of 1.63 is amazing on stiff sidewalls.

We performed no tuning at all on the CHP engine even though the air sucked (it was hot and muggy), and we didn't figure out the clutch problem until it was too late to fix. Based on trap speed and seat-of-the-pants feel, it should be a low-11-second car as is, and with a little engine and shock tuning and a pair of slicks and skinnies, we don't think a 10-second pass is at all out of the question.

8/12Neato touches like the flip-up gas cap are all over the car.

The only handling tests we could conduct were tossing it around on the pit roads like a drifter for Greg Jarem's cameras. The roads were narrow and the track officials were freaking out, but the car proved to be ultimately controllable and very tossable. It wasn't as tail-happy as expected, but a quick stab with the right foot will hang the tail out and allow you to keep it out for as long as you want. This thing would rock at a drifting event.

9/12David Smith is the energetic man behind Factory Five, together with his brother Mark. He drives and races what he sells, and most of the guys he has working for him have engineering degrees and have built their own cars.

Where the car goes now we're not sure, since those plans changed midway through the build, but we're trying to persuade the parties involved to send it to California for a while so we can drive it some more and try to get better numbers at the track. Some road-course action wouldn't be a bad thing either. If that happens, we'll be sure to provide an update. In the meantime, if you've thought about building an FFR car yourself, don't be afraid. It's not impossible, you'll probably have between $18,000 and $40,000 in it by the time it's done (depending on how nice or radical you want it), and the end product is a brutal little road rocket that's enormous fun to drive.

10/12

With kits for the Cobra roadster and the Daytona Coupe, we wondered if FFR would do a GT40-based kit, and here's their answer. While the existing two cars are based heavily off the originals, the GTM is a brand-new design that uses Chevy parts instead of FFR's traditional Ford leanings. This one's a mid-engine supercar that uses '97-'04 C5 Corvette parts, including the LS1/LS2 engine. Because it's more practical, it uses a Porsche 911 transaxle, but the brakes, spindles, hubs, and control arms all come from the Corvette parts bin or a wrecked donor car. A tubular steel space frame includes a six-point rollcage and is covered by a composite body. The kit price is targeted at just under $20,000 and should be ready by the time you read this. FFR brought this rough prototype to the track to make some very early shakedown runs, and it ran 12.50 at 117 mph.

11/12

COBRA-DynoSince we didn't have our own dyno numbers on the Coast High Performance 427 small-block Ford ("Cobra in a Box," October '05), we strapped the Sidewinder to the DynoJet at MPE Racing in Taunton, Massachusetts, to see what it was putting to the rear tires. Two runs showed identical horsepower numbers of 441 at 5,700 rpm and 424 lb-ft of torque at 4,500. The torque curve was as flat as a pool table from 3,200 all the way to 5,500 rpm.

12/12

COBRA-SpecTo prove the durability of its cars, and because FFR owner David Smith likes to race, the company created the Spec Racer kits. The cars use a modified version of the street car's chassis and suspension and run in their own class within NASA's divisional races. FFR gets a lot of cars in the field, and the racing is really tight--call and ask for a promo DVD and you'll see what we mean. Because they are limited on engine mods (pretty much stock 5.0 EFI engines are required) and the cars are light, durability is fantastic. We want one. No, we need one. See more at www.nasaproracing.com.